But for Diamond to hang on to the mantle of disinterestedness the question *cannot* come from him. It has to be Yali’s question because it has to appear as a question that would occur in the same way, to any person, faced with the same set of inputs. So, again, I think Fred and Deborah are exactly right to pursue — is the question really occurring to Yali the same way it is to Diamond? Are the inputs self-evidently the same?

It reminds me of my all-time favorite joke. A troubled fellow consults a psychiatrist. During their initial session, the psychiatrist uses Rorschach blots as prompts for free association. The patient describes them all as varieties of sexual imagery. At the end of the session, the psychiatrist says, “well, I think one thing we might want to explore further is your evident sexual obsession”. The patient replies, outraged, “What? *my* sexual obsession!?! *You’re* the one with all the dirty pictures!”

I think Ozma’s right, of course, that Diamond gets a particular kind of rhetorical mileage from hearing his own question on Yali’s lips (which doesn’t mean Yali didn’t say something of the sort, only that Diamond was poised to hear it, that he’d already ‘heard’ it before it was said). But it might be worth asking how the book reads if the framing device disappears, if Diamond starts by saying, “I’ve often wondered why people in the developed world are so rich and people in the developing world are so poor”. In a funny kind of way, this opens Diamond up to his right-wing critics (and yes, there are some).

Yali’s question is really Diamond’s question. But it would be uncomfortable for Diamond to “own” that question. How would he pose it? “I, Diamond, went to PNG and couldn’t help but be struck by how little stuff they had compared to how much stuff there is back home”. As Diamond’s question, it is not possessed of the same quality of ingenousness it has (or can be figured as having) if it is Yali’s question. Diamond needs Yali rather than himself to make the West-and-the-rest comparision for it to not to come across as invidious.

I think Fred and Deborah are talking about how the question is nevertheless not ingenuous as Yali’s question, either, and they are making the point that Diamond didn’t take account of the fact that in context, the question was just as layered (and thus liable to disingenuousness) coming from Yali as it was coming from Diamond.

So even if we concede that Diamond doesn’t derive any of his authority from understanding Yali in context, Diamond does carve a good bit of authorial wiggle-room out of presenting Yali’s question as an ingenous one of the “golly!” variety.

Therefore it does matter — even for Diamond’s purposes — that Yali’s question is not a “golly!” sort of query at all.

I agree with your point that Fred and Deborah provide only anecdotal evidence about the public effects of Guns, Germs, and Steel. This is the ‘crude functionalism’ argument and I think we have got to the bottom of it — they are offering their impressions and have not conducted research on it. As for the rest:

“In the end, what troubles me here is that the argument against Diamond is partially based on an assertion that Yali could not have said what Diamond says he said…”

I don’t think they have ever argued this.

“…or that if he said it, it could not have been meant in the ways that Diamond hears it…”

I think this is what they claim — Yali’s question has implications that Diamond did not notice.

“…that it finally and truly belongs in a local history, and can be successfully translated only by containing it within that history.”

I’m sure they argue that Yali’s comments must be understood in the context they were uttered – surely that’s not controversial? As for the idea that Yali belongs ‘only in local history’ I don’t think they argue that.

Could you explain a bit more what you mean here? Because I’m having difficulty believing that the interpretation I offer below is correct.

1) “Western” actors often invoke (economic, physical, geographical, divine) necessity as a way of justifying coercive/exploitative practices, e.g., “the bottom line is that you must dismantle your welfare state or the harsh realities of the market will punish you,” “the bottom line is that import-substitution industrialization ignores the efficiency gains from pursuing comparative advantage,” “the bottom line is that God is on our side and so we will defeat you,” etc.

2) Diamond argues that geographical (mostly) necessity explains the fact that Europe imperialized most of the globe, at one time or another, between 1492 and 1945.

3) Therefore, Diamond’s book reinforces a “Western” master-narrative of domination.

However, I would continue to maintain that the critique of Diamond that we are seeing here is partially premised on a claim that his work satisfies the desires of his audience of “educated haves” to be absolved of a relation to global inequality; I think that it is impossible to keep that critique from rebounding onto the desire to render a history which is faithful to the local experience of PNGuineans and which in being faithful hopes to also have an effect on educated haves. It’s impossible to keep that critique from rebounding because there is just as deep a history of desire for such an account among the educated haves as there is for the one Diamond provisions.

I also do think that the critique offered here of Diamond’s uses of Yali’s question is one that invokes tropes of restoration, of insistence that Yali is “PNGuinean”, in precisely the passage I’ve cited, the one that transits from Strathern’s work to Fred and Deborah’s knowledge of Yali. I think that’s precisely the sort of thing I have in mind when I suggest that many of us make one kind of assertion up front and disavow it in quiet (and perhaps even accidental) ways on the downside. In the end, what troubles me here is that the argument against Diamond is partially based on an assertion that Yali could not have said what Diamond says he said, or that if he said it, it could not have been meant in the ways that Diamond hears it, that it finally and truly belongs in a local history, and can be successfully translated only by containing it within that history.

Ditto with your reference to Coca Cola. I do not know if you had meant to obliquiely reference Fred and Deborah’s discussion of Coca Cola in Yali’s Question, or Robert Foster’s work on it in _Materializing The Nation_ (I second Strongthomas’s nomination of Foster’s work) but we all agree about that as well. Coca Cola is obviously a part of Papua New Guinea now — as anyone who has been there even briefly could tell you. Who would argue otherwise? Honestly.

You say that “Yali can’t be sifted” and this is, of course, the _point_ of Fred and Deborah’s posts, of which I hope we will have more soon.

“At times parochial and at times metropolitan, the people in our story burned grasslands to hunt wild pigs and fed factory boilers to produce sugar; they lined up for colonial censuses and voted in national elections; they defended their worth against all comers and submitted to hierarchical industrial controls; they maintained local identities and established regional, national, and international commitments; they were advised by expatriates and golfed with elite Papua New Guineans; they transacted in shell money or other traditional valuables and bought goods with a national currency responsive to International Monetary Fund policies; they grew crops for their own subsistence and produced commodities for national and world markets; they consumed coconuts with kin and shared soft-drinks with shift-workers. Moreover, all of these experiences — including the contrasts between them — were appraised according to ideas of what life was, is, and could become. And these were only the Papua New Guineans …. ”

That Burke wants to misread us is, we think, to make his own (rather well-known, at least in anthroplogy)points about the complexities of the contemporary world. We look forward to his work on Zimbabwe.

The one place where it most specifically comes into Fred and Deborah’s writings here is precisely the passage I’ve cited above. They acknowledge the “modernity” of Yali’s own individual career and social world, describe it, but then move to clarify him as “PNGuinean”, and the discourse of Yali’s question as primarily about a local historical discourse on equality. (Hence the allegation that Diamond gets the question wrong by seeing it as parallel to his own global or “Western” interests.)

I think that’s a reasonably typical example of the general problem I’m describing. To say that PNGuinea is different than anywhere else in the world, and shaped by its own local histories is one thing. That’s something I say myself a great deal, for example, in what I’m writing now, that contemporary Zimbabwean politics is as shaped by “deep grammars” of Shona political thought as it is by modern forms of national and bureaucratic rule. The point is I wouldn’t try to say it’s one or the other: it’s both, always, in the now of Zimbabwe. You do need to know the history to see its presence in what look like everyday, ordinary modern authoritarian behaviors, but you don’t need to superimpose the deep history and pronounce Zimbabwean political figures as essentially “Zimbabwean” either once you recognize that history’s presence.

To say that Yali’s question or Yali is “PNGuinean” as a statement in which I see Fred and Deborah meaningto contrast against his involvements with the West or his admitted experience with modernity. This is something different than what I’m doing with Shona political forms, and it’s the latter statement that was made here: the two things are contrasted by Fred and Deborah. I think they put aspects of Yali’s world and thought in tension, or insist on resolving him to be “PNGuinean” in ways that are far more than simply saying, “PNGuinea is its own place with its own history”.

Let me put it more drastically and politically. Coca Cola is just as much *part* of PNGuinea now as Yali or the Highlanders. This is not a statement that approves of labor forms or consumer economies or anything that Coca Cola does. One may make this statement and immediately follow it with an intense moral or political or even aesthetic critique of Coca Cola in general or in specific within PNGuinea, and have that critique be wholly legitimate. It’s the contrast that’s the problem, the dividing of the now of any society on the globe into things which are authentic to the deep histories and things which are not, the sifting through of experience. Yali can’t be sifted: any account of his life makes that pretty clear to me.

I’m cool with talking about other PNG scholarship, by the way, and would be very content to take on any recommendations you have. The cargo cult literature is the only work I read a lot of, due to my interest in commodification. (Though the Thomas book I’ve mentioned really isn’t about PNG much: I cite it because I think it’s such a good general critique of existing scholarship on colonialism and colonial discourse, and one that is often overlooked.) Bruce Knauft’s work has always impressed me and I’ve been a devotee of his scholarship since I was at Emory for a brief while early in my career. And of course it’s impossible for anyone who practices any kind of ethnography to avoid the place of PNG in the development of anthopological thought. But I’m sure there’s a lot of recent work that I haven’t had time to read and think through. I don’t think this is a debate that will be resolved readily by the specifics of the PNG literature, however: I’m aiming at an epistemological tendency that I think is bigger than PNG, and more generally distributed in the practice of cultural anthropology and postcolonial theory.